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and suffered and died, had risen and ascended and reigned in them. So that Divine life, in
fine, carried them to its last stage. It was not Dionysius or Ruysbroeck, the author of The
Cloud of Unknowing, or the soul of the poor imprisoned Jesuit Molinos, but the Christ
nature within each and all of these, within ten thousand times ten thousand of their peers,
in all ages and nations and faiths and climes, which entered into the incredible intensity;
and that which is termed the act or state of being lost in God is that which I have
elsewhere described in a perfection of all similitudes--which is of my adaptation but not
of my making--when Christ delivers up the Kingdom of each soul to His Father, and God
is all in all.
This is the state which is beyond the state when it is said that "they shall see His face."
Hereof is the mystic tradition in Christian Time; it has been perpetuated in an unbroken
line from the beginnings of the new dispensation until this now. It is of course in itself the
most secret, exotic and incomprehensible of all languages, though at the same time it is
the most open, universal and simple. The understanding of it is a question of experience,
and the experience is attained in sanctity, though--as I have said, but also elsewhere--the
intellectual light concerning it belongs rather to the dedication out of which sanctity may
at length issue than to the state of saintship itself. The technicalities of the occult sciences
may seem hard to the beginner, and they are actually hard like the wilderness, because
they are barren wastes, but they are in words of one syllable if compared with the little
catechisms of eternal life, which are exclusive to the children of God.
p. xxxviii
Behind this Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King--which is so like the eye of
the needle--there is the concealed tradition in and behind the mysticism of Christian
Times. About this it is scarcely possible to speak here, and it will require some care not to
confuse the image with which I have opened my statement. The Open Entrance of course
leads to the Palace, but at a certain point there is found an exceedingly hidden postern
and a path beyond, which is absolutely unattainable except through the lawful entrance,
because, although the Kingdom of Heaven tolerates a certain quality of enlightened and
loving violence, the sanctuary of all its sanctuaries responds only to the violence of that
man who knows how to lay hands on himself, so that he may carry none of his extrinsics
to the most intrinsecus place in all the world of God. This postern is hidden deeply on the
deepest side of tradition, but by what can be traced concerning it, I think that there has
been such a going to and fro upon the Ladder of Jacob that something more of the states
which are not the term, but are perhaps penultimate thereto, has been brought back by
those who have accomplished the next but one to all of the Great Work. I think further
that they have gone so far that they have seen with their own eyes some intimacies of the
term itself--being the state of those who go in and do not evermore come back.
These are aspects of the Secret Tradition in so far as it has declared itself on the side of
God. It remains now to be said that there is a tradition à rebours, and though it may seem
very hard to put it so roughly and frankly, I have not taken all the consciousness of the
inward man for my province to smooth or reduce any of the distinctions between the loss
and gain of the soul. The tradition a rebours is definitely and clearly that of miraculous